Midnight in Chernobyl
–Adam Higginbotham
★★★★★ 4/5
In some unfrequented section of the upper levels of the library of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where one can find the hardbound final year project dissertations of the institute’s graduating students, hopefully lies my own humble submission: An Energy Audit of the Kakrapara Nuclear Power Plant. While the emphasis of my project work was on the thermodynamics of power generation and its measurement, I nevertheless had to familiarize myself with nuclear power generation in general and also the setup and operation of the Kakrapara plant in particular. It has been two decades since my project, but reading this book, brought back memories. I remember poring over classified documents (with sufficient clearance of course) describing the layout and operating plans of the power plant, and in the process, learning much about nuclear power plant operations.
Midnight in Chernobyl is a feat of journalism, research and investigation, dispassionately calling attention to not just what transpired on that fateful night of the world’s worst nuclear disaster but also the events leading up to the event and its aftermath. The intervening three decades since the disaster have resulted in several versions of events, often conflicting and many bordering on myth. Mr. Higginbotham has pieced together an authoritative version gleaned from years of research and interviews.
While perhaps not overtly intending to be so, in many ways the book is an indictment of the failed aspirations of the Soviet Communist State and at a deeper level, of Communist ideology itself. For it is clear from Mr. Higginbotham’s narrative that while the proximal cause of the nuclear meltdown of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl plant was inevitably operator error (what else could it be?), the real seeds of the disaster had been sown decades before: by the arrogance of the designers of the RBMK–1000 reactor and the power accorded to them by Soviet bureaucracy; by the relentless need for propaganda conjuring an air of infallibility and supremacy of the Soviet state over the capitalist West in every respect; by the resulting paranoid control of the flow of all information by Soviet authorities leading to crippling secrecy and in turn, the criminal suppression of information on critical design deficiencies of the reactor; and by the fear, sycophancy and corruption up and down the ranks of power within the Communist leadership, which combined with the whip of unreasonable targets to outdo Cold War adversaries, forced fakery and poor quality control at all levels of manufacturing.
The book is the story of all of these things but humanized through the descriptions of the background, personalities and motivations of the several players in this tragedy, each of whom was ultimately only a pawn, as individuals almost always are, in the inexorable sweep of destiny.
The book is also the story of the heroism of several men and women, many who knowingly and some unknowingly, braved the grave dangers of the radiation they were exposing themselves to, in dealing with the aftermath and clean up of the reactor explosions, to ensure containment of the radiation fallout. Not all of those efforts were fruitful as we learn later in the book, but that does not make the efforts any less commendable—especially in light of the horrifying effects of radiation that many of those ‘first responders’ had to endure.
Finally, the book is the story of the trial and blame for the entire tragedy placed on the plant director and a few operating personnel, and their quest for redemption.
The book is a must read for anyone who wants to know what really happened leading up to, during and the aftermath of the world’s most famous nuclear disaster: rich in detail and lucid in explaining both technical and non technical aspects of the disaster. If it has a fault, it is that there is on occasion, too much detail with the bios of characters, making it hard to stick with the course of the main subject of the book—the unfolding disaster.
PS: I subsequently watched HBO’s excellently made Chernobyl and have to say the series and this book greatly complement each other.
1 thought on “Midnight in Chernobyl”
HBO Chernobyl was harrowing to watch but sooo well made!